7 Reasons to Launch A Personal Website as a Developer

It’s pretty easy to create your own website these days. You often don’t need to know much about how to code or how web hosting works. The latest types of websites are simply templates of profile pages where you can fill in text, links, and photos. You don’t even need to have too many subpages. All you need is a single killer landing page.

“If you’re a developer you shouldn’t go for that, though,” says Hakim Didas, a developer at EssayOnTime. “As a developer, there are many reasons why you should code your own personal website and launch it yourself. You will learn a lot on the way and it will build your skill and confidence.”

While we were convinced with that simple explanation, we decided to dig a little deeper to find even more reasons why you should consider launching your own website as a developer. Here are 7 main reasons why you should do it.

1. Your Own Branding is Under Your Control

At no other time in history has branding been as important as it is now. With most of your persona lying on the World Wide Web and your public social media profiles, you constantly have a reputation to build and maintain, and you need to make sure it is the very best. The last thing you want to do is entrust your reputation in the hands of someone else.

This is just as important in the world of developers as it is in any other world. When you launch your own personal website, one that you designed and optimized from scratch from yourself, then you control the look and feel, as well as the content of the website. You control how the world out there views you, the story they get about you and, therefore, the brand they perceive in you.

2. It Becomes Your Portfolio

As a developer, part of what makes you stand out is your portfolio of previously done work. When recruiters and potential clients get to know about you, they want to know more than just the personal. They are even less concerned about your academic pedigree than they are about your achievements in your craft. What work have you done? What are you currently working on? All of these questions will instantly be answered when your visitors get to see your portfolio on your website.

Your website is also part of your portfolio. Since you built it from scratch, it represents what you can do and you can proudly point out on your website that you built it from the bottom up. Your clients will really appreciate that.

3. Use it to Stand Out

Most companies now use social media as a recruiting tool either formally or informally. The problem is that just about everyone has a social media profile, which means including a link to your LinkedIn will just make you one among many people who do the same thing. It’s easy to get lost in the sea of similar profiles.

However, if you include a link to your personal website in your resume, where every single relevant piece of information about you can be found, you allow recruiters to take the guesswork out of engaging with you and you improve your chances of being selected.

4. Improve your Coding Skills

Coding is the kind of thing that you constantly have to practice if you’re going to get good at it. What better way to do that than work on a project that promotes you and your skills?

Building a website from scratch isn’t easy. You need to understand HTML, Javascript, and CSS in order to do it well. In case you specialized in a different programming language, this is the perfect opportunity to learn something new while actively applying it. In case you already know a bit of each of those, you get the opportunity to improve your skills.

However you look at it, you’re going to be a much better developer by the time you’re done building your personal website and that will come in handy later when you’re given even larger web projects.

5. Improve your Non-coding Skills

Building a website from scratch involves a lot more than just coding. You need to know and understand enough about UI and UX to design a website that is great to look at. You also need to know all about both front-end and back-end development, hosting, and even blogging, in case you decide to have a blog as part of your website. All of these are important skills that don’t have much to do with programming but are still important for a developer to know. By building your own website, you will gain valuable experience in these and many other areas.

6. Practice Code Maintenance

Most of the time, a developer doesn’t even spend time coding creatively; most of the time they spend actively refactoring and maintaining code. It’s a boring job but it’s something you have to learn to do effectively if you’re going to be a good developer. By building your own website from scratch, you will own and understand all of the code and will, therefore, have to maintain it yourself. That might seem easy, but try going back to code you wrote months or years ago and understanding it. It might as well have been written by someone else. Actively maintaining your own website will teach you the fundamentals of code maintenance.

7. You’ll Have Fun

They don’t have to all be formal technical reasons. Sometimes we do things for the fun if for nothing else. Building your own website should be a fun challenge that you can take up as a developer just for the reward of it.

Building your own website from scratch should be a fun endeavor that allows you to exercise your creativity and focus on your personal branding. It might seem extra difficult while you’re doing it, but it really does pay off in the long run.

Serena Dorf is an enthusiastic content writer. She is passionate about writing, personal development, psychology, and productivity. In her free time, she is reading classic American literature and learning Swedish. Feel free to connect with her on Twitter.